Over six years ago, I started asking myself this seemingly simple question: “What does Vladimir Putin eat?” If the man’s every move is covered by a small army of reporters, surely his meal preferences must be common knowledge. Yet it turned out not to be so easy… Vlad prefers to enjoy some privacy when it […]

This is exciting! After nearly eight years of blogging about Eastern Europe, I’m finally writing my first travel series about Russia, albeit the distances physically traveled are relatively small — mostly from one Moscow restaurant to the next. That’s right: for a whole week last winter, I ate my way through over a dozen restaurants, […]

I know, I know, this blog is already filled with plov recipes. I published my first Uzbek plov entry almost eight years ago here, then I used it as stuffing for a roasted leg of lamb here. I tried a version with wild turkey, raisins, and butternut squash here, then went back to a traditional recipe here. I […]

It recently dawned on me that I somehow managed to write an entire series of posts about Georgia, and barely talk about Georgian wine, except for a quick bit about Racha. The omission wasn’t intentional, mind you: as as early as the second post, I was promising to write about the wineries of Kakheti, Georgia’s most […]

Nearly every country counts some kind of sweet fried dough among its desserts. Americans eat doughnuts, Indians have gulab jamun, the French make beignets, and I’ve already written about fritule, Dalmatian fritters. Lithuanians are no exception, and in his class on Eastern European desserts at the Institute of Culinary Education (which I have mentioned previously), Michael […]

In my last Uzbek Adventures post, we caught a glimpse of Samarkand’s restaurants. We had lunch by the Registan and tasted exotic kebabs and wines in the Russian part of town. The Bibi-Khanym Mosque is the tourist’s next logical destination, and while there, it’s impossible to miss the food market next to it, the Siyob Bazaar. […]

Every year around Easter, I invariably muse that it would be nice to post an Eastern European lamb recipe on these pages, and then realize that lamb isn’t really eaten with any regularity in that part of the world. Lucky for me, there are a few exceptions in regions with a Muslim population, in the […]

One of the oldest continuously inhabited cities in Central Asia, Samarkand is just a short ride from Bukhara, whether by road or by rail, thanks to the new super fast Afrosiyob trains. Just like in Bukhara, the visitors’ focus is usually on the impressive architecture. But as Uzbekistan’s second largest city, Samarkand has more to […]

Walnut rolls are common in many cuisines of Eastern Europe. Hungarians eat bejgli, Slovenians have potica, and Croatians make povitica, generally for Christmas and Easter. The dessert counts many variations: the layers can be thick or thin, the roll can be baked as a log or folded in a loaf pan, and poppy seeds can replace walnuts. […]

I’ve been wanting to write about Georgian wines for quite a while now. First I promised I would include a chapter about Kakheti wineries in my Georgian Adventures series, and completely forgot about it (I’ll fix that soon). Then I started buying Georgian wines and jotting down tasting notes about them, but felt like a […]